Technical Communication Graduate Applied Projects

This report details the communication training workshop from inception to implementation. The overall goal of the workshop was to give the company's internal employees the tools necessary to effectively communicate with the organization's external employees. Developing the workshop required first determining the organization's key challenges. From there it was necessary to identify which of those challenges would be improved through improved communication. The observation method was used to research where communication between internal and external employees commonly broke down. Once the significant communication challenges were identified, the workshop was developed and implemented. This report examines the effectiveness of the workshop in detail and outlines both the successes and the challenges the workshop faced. There are detailed plans to improve the workshop as well as a thorough explanation as to why permanent implementation of Communication Training Workshop will be beneficial to the organization.

The purpose of this project is to show how to develop research-based criteria and how to apply them to a specific product, Evernote's iOS mobile help tool. Initial research involved analyzing current usability research publications by performing the following steps: coding each sample for most frequent usability criteria, clarifying and simplifying each entry, reorganizing the content in each code for frequency, and combining each topic in the new organizational structure to create a single set of research-based usability guidelines. The new guidelines were used to evaluated Getting Started and Getting Started Guide from the perspective of a non-business, English-speaking, novice iOS user. The final step resulted in the following list of recommendations to improve the user experience: review and adjust the navigation design, reconsider the information design to ensure that it reflects the wide variety of users and platforms, adjust the visual design to meet cultural expectations and user needs, and edit content for clarity, word choice, and grammatical style.

The primary goal of this research was to identify the elements of members' website usage stories (including plot points and story scope), and which brand principles of Free Range CrossFit, like personal development (among others), can be identified in those storytelling elements. To accomplish this, I designed the interview questions to uncover these patterns in the various plot points of their journey as users, and developed a coding manual with the elements of "Brand" and "User Story" to code the transcripts. I then coded the transcribed results using Atlas.ti program, and identified occurrences and co-occurrences between the two concepts. The results showed that the website is being used to track members' personal development, which aligns with Brand principles from mainstream CrossFit, and the gym's mission and value statements. The data also suggests that members identified their usage stories through various scopes. While the beginning of story outlined by members was clear, the data suggests that there is room for improvement towards the end of the members' journey as users of the website, and recommendations are provided.